A Murder in Tuscany

Starred review from June 20, 2011
Kent combines rich atmospherics and fully realized characters with a deceptively simple puzzle in her outstanding second mystery featuring Italian PI Sandro Cellini (after 2010's The Drowning River). When the body of Leona Meadows-Mascarello, the director of the Orfeo Trust's "celebrated Creative Arts Program," housed in a Tuscany castle, is found in a ravine near the wreckage of her car, the endearing, self-effacing Cellini investigates what initially appears to be an accidental death, caused by the victim's hitting a patch of ice at high speed. Meanwhile, Cellini and his wife, Luisa, struggle in their childless marriage in the wake of her recovery from breast cancer. Cellini blends the disingenuous cleverness of a Columbo with the world-weary awareness of how things really work of Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti. The sleuth's ingenious detection of evidence pointing toward foul play portends a long and successful series run. Louise Penny fans will find a lot to like.

August 1, 2011

Despite his personal problems, melancholy private investigator Sandro Cellini is determined to ferret out a cunning killer who hides in plain sight among the rich and famous.

Castle Orfeo, built in the 15th century and overlooking the city of Florence, currently attracts artists from all over the world as an idyllic retreat. Though its director, Loni Meadows, has the face of a Madonna, she runs the castle with an iron hand, earning the enmity of virtually all the staff—senior assistants Luca and Mauro, veteran cook Ginevra and her niece Nicki, maid Anna-Maria and even Cate Giottone (from whose perspective readers see much of the novel), the newest member of the staff and the only one who lives offsite. Little aware of these dynamics, P.I. Sandro Cellini (The Drowning River, 2010, etc.) has been hired to shadow teenager Carlotta Bellagamba, whose parents fear that she's getting into drugs. Recently dismissed from the police force and perpetually insecure about his relationship with his wife Luisa, he reflects as often on his love life as on the details of his assignment. On the same day that Carlotta fails to come home from school, Loni goes missing from Castle Orfeo. The crossing paths of searchers bring Sandro into the Castle's unique society. Carlotta returns, Loni does not. After a few days, her body is found in a river, and Sandro finds himself at the center of a tantalizing murder puzzle.

Sandro's third case is a murky psychological thriller packed with complex, secretive characters and lush prose to match.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2011
In her previous mystery set in Florence, The Drowning River (2010), Kent introduced Sandro Cellini, a man dismissed from the Florentine Polizia for a small indiscretion and forced to scrape together a living as a private eye. This second Cellini mystery follows him as he continues to adapt to life outside the police, with a wife battling cancer and all routines disrupted. Cellini is a fascinating character, morose yet strong, suited for far more than the surveillance of a teen girl, his current job, but he brings his all to it. The past reaches out to Cellini when an old acquaintance, the director of a creative-arts colony in the Tuscan countryside, is found dead at the wheel of her car. Cellini is drawn into the workings of the refurbished fifteenth-century Castello Orfeo, where the murder victim presided over artists' retreats. Kent delivers an ingenious country-house mystery here, complete with Agatha Christie byplay among the clashing characters and spiked by the acerbic, witty presence of Cellini.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)